Why the worst idea in linguistics wonโt die: Why the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is mostly wrong (mostly)
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English is weirder than you think. Every week I dig into the hidden history of everyday words: etymology, Old English, and the accidents that shaped how you speak. Linguistics PhD. deadlanguagesociety.com
Why the worst idea in linguistics wonโt die: Why the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is mostly wrong (mostly)
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I did not know that... truly bizarre. Thank you!
02.03.2026 19:42 โ ๐ 1 ๐ 0 ๐ฌ 0 ๐ 0
And the purists couldnโt even follow their own rules: Cheke alone used dozens of Latin loanwords in his own writing.
One of the few words championed by purists that's still in common use is โnaysay,โ probably because it was already used in Scotland before the purists ever got to it.
โNegationโ was first attested before 1425, โlogicโ had been used by English writers since 1362, and โresurrectionโ since about 1300. โProphetโ was first used before the Norman Conquest!
The purists were pulling up roots, rather than pruning new growth...
One purist, Sir John Cheke, proposed โgainrisingโ for resurrection and โforesayerโ for โprophet.โ His colleague Ralph Lever gave us โwitcraftโ for logic and โnaysayโ for negation.
But these Latin-derived words had been used in English for generations.
In the 1550s, a group of purists decided Latin loanwords were corrupting the English language. Their solution was to coin โpure Englishโ replacements.
Some of their proposals were pretty weird.
The whole system seems to have been built around brightness rather than hue.
So how did the modern system evolve? How did English go from six basic colours to the eleven we have today?
I wrote up the full story here: www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/history-en...
Old English colour words are genuinely strange.
First, there were only six basic colour terms, and they each covered a lot of the colour space.
The word brลซn, the ancestor of "brown," could mean brown, purple, dark red, or the gleam of a polished sword.
And "blue" was barely in the picture.
This week, I wrote about how Greek and Russian speakers process blue differently than English speakers do, because their languages carve it into two colours.
But English has its own version of this story.
Speaking of good stories, if you'd like to read the full account of the long debate how language affects thought, it's up today on my newsletter:
www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/sapir-whor...
The weak version, where the language you speak gives a slight processing advantage in lab conditions, doesn't make for great fiction.
And nothing travels faster than a good story!
And yet itโs the strong version that has lived on in the public mind.
So why won't that version die?
In part, because it's irresistible to storytellers. From Orwell's Newspeak to the alien language of Arrival, the strong version offers a world where language is magic.
As a result of research like Malotkiโs, the strong version has disappeared from within the walls of linguistics departments.
But alongside this, study after study has confirmed that the weak version is basically right in limited circumstances: language does nudge thought at the margins.
In 1983, the linguist Ekkehart Malokti published a 700-page rebuttal.
The epigraph of his book was a single Hopi sentence, translated as: โThen indeed, the following day, quite early in the morning at the hour when people pray to the sun, around that time then he woke up the girl again.โ
Touchรฉ!
The strong version was built on Benjamin Lee Whorfโs claim that the Hopi language had โno words, grammatical forms, constructions or expressions that refer directly to what we call โtimeโ.โ
Whorf believed that this led to an entirely different way of perceiving the world.
But if you give Russian speakers a verbal task that occupies the language centres of the brain while theyโre distinguishing colours, the advantage vanishes completely.
This is evidence that the (slight) Russian superpower comes from language.
The weak version has real evidence behind it. The strong version does not.
Hereโs what the weak version looks like in practice. Russian has two basic words for blue: siniy (dark) and goluboy (light).
Russian speakers distinguish shades across that boundary faster than English speakers do.
There are two versions of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: the strong version says language constrains what you can think.
The weak version says language affects what you think.
For example, it might make you slightly faster at distinguishing colours, or bias how you remember spatial arrangements.
The idea is usually called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
But the name is misleading: the two linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf never co-authored a paper. In fact, the term was coined after both were dead, by a third linguist.
But the name has stuck.
There was an idea in linguistics that the language you speak determines what you can think. That is, if your language has no word for a concept, that concept is unavailable to you.
This idea has been more or less dead in linguistics for decades. But itโs had a strange afterlife in the wider world.
Full story out tomorrow.
If you're not already reading Dead Language Society, here's the link: www.deadlanguagesociety.com
Why the worst idea in linguistics won't die.
The most famous idea from linguistics is that your language determines what you can think.
It's the premise behind the film Arrival, Orwell's Newspeak, and every โuntranslatable wordโ listicle.
And it's been dead in linguistic circles for a long time... although it has had a curious afterlife.
Thank you, Gretchen! A little thorn and yogh go a long way!
23.02.2026 14:52 โ ๐ 3 ๐ 0 ๐ฌ 0 ๐ 0
Even Latin โsinisterโ likely originated in a word meaning โmore advantageous.โ
This process is called taboo avoidance: the same impulse that makes people say โthe good folkโ instead of naming the fairies.
You give something a nice name not because you like it, but because youโre afraid of it.
Latin โsinisterโ just meant โleftโ before it meant โevil.โ The word keeps going bad, and speakers keep reaching for a fresh euphemism.
Ancient Greek did something similar to Old English, calling the left side โaristeros,โ โthe better one.โ
It was a superstitious euphemism. The left side was considered unlucky and dangerous, so you called it something nice to keep it from harming you.
Across European languages, words for โleftโ are strikingly unstable, constantly being replaced as each new term absorbs the old stigma.
Old English didn't use the words โleftโ and โrightโ for the two hands. Instead, it used โwinestreโ and โswiรพreโ: โfriendlierโ and โstronger.โ
But โfriendlierโ wasnโt meant as a compliment.
If you liked this experiment, I published a full piece today in the same vein: a text that gets 100 years older with every section, from a modern blog post to a medieval chronicle.
It's a single story spanning 1000 years of English. See how far you get.
www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-far-ba...
รy furรฐor รพu underbรฆc fรฆrst, รพy gelicor biรพ Englisc gesewen รพรฆre Deniscan sprรฆce. Englisce bec รพรฆs m. geare ne mรฆg nan mann rรฆdan buton he sundorlice geleornad sy.
18.02.2026 18:40 โ ๐ 532 ๐ 24 ๐ฌ 13 ๐ 7Yet tuo hundred wintre er, sone after รพat the Normans comen to รพis londe, is Englisch on muchel wandlunge. รe tunges work is tobroken, Frensce wordes comeรพ in, and รพe writunge is al totwemed.
18.02.2026 18:40 โ ๐ 507 ๐ 20 ๐ฌ 8 ๐ 8